Customer Reviews

This Dark World: A Memoir of Salvation Found and Lost

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

First of all: Carolyn Briggs has chosen to share her story with the world, a story which might anger some, and she should be admired for having the courage to do so. It's because this is her personal story that I've given this two stars instead of one - she deserves credit for examining her experiences and trying to come to terms with them, and for opening her soul up to the world in this way.

That said, this is a frustrating, disappointing and ultimately sad book. Briggs' early days as a confused pregnant teenager are portrayed well, and her eventual drift into a radical Pentecostal church is understandable and moving. However, it is here that the book begins to go wrong. Briggs' intellectually stifling experiences in the church are contrasted with her growing personal desire to explore and question her life and her religion; however, this conflict is presented with surprisingly little insight into her motivations and actions. Did Briggs do any research into or exploring of Christianity on her own? Did she try, but was prevented? How did she square these new feelings with the feelings of her conversion? Questions like these abound, but are too often glossed over or ignored. Briggs seems unwilling to look too deeply at her loss of faith and the possible alternatives that she chose not to explore. As a result, her eventual apparent conversion to atheism is baffling - was there nothing about her faith she thought salvageable? If not, why? Has she considered that if it was so easy to throw it away, it may not have been faith that she had in the first place? As it stands, the book reads like she simply decided that religion was too hard and tossed it.

This is another problem with her account - much of her troubles seem based on a desire for the easy way out, for liberation, in the current hedonistic sense of the word. Her marital troubles therefore come across as largely her own fault - essentially, she was bored and blamed it on her husband for not being more exciting or sophisticated. As a result, she abandons her family without looking back and takes off to Europe to find herself. This is not a picture of a serious seeker, but a rather shallow, self-centered woman. In fairness to Briggs, this may not be what actually happened, but it certainly read that way to me, especially when I got to the florid romantic prose at the end of the book (a section, by the way, that reads like nothing so much as a teenager's account of an infatuation, not a mature woman discovering real love). Meanwhile, we hear next to nothing of her abandoned husband and children, as if they are irrelevant to her new life. I ended up suspicious that the same will eventually happen to her new husband, as Briggs does not seem to understand that passion cannot be the foundation of a lasting relationship.

In the end, one wonders what it is Briggs has actually accomplished. She has disposed of one religion and family, but she doesn't seem to have replaced them with anything substantial - she apparently did no serious intellectual searching, and she never acknowledges or deals directly with the implications of her loss of faith and her new lifestyle. When I closed the book, the portrait I had of Briggs was that of a woman who splashed around in the shallow end of Christianity, decided she wanted deeper waters, and instead of learning to swim, jumped into another shallow pool and pretended that it was deep. As one who has faced that dark night of the soul, and who subsequently spent years researching and testing my faith, this came across as inadequate, to say the least.

As a novel, this would be an interesting character study; as a real woman's experiences, the predominant emotion I felt after finishing this book was pity. I would welcome a sequel, but only if it shows more insight and understanding, both of faith and of herself, than "This Dark World" displays. I'm not sorry I read it, but I can't recommend it.

I found This Dark World to be readable, at times engrossing, and a valuable insight into the born-again mentality. The positive sides of the Christian existence, namely the close relationship (fellowship) with a community of fellow worshippers, was very clearly described in this book. At times, I almost felt jealous of what the author had, which is a rare experience for me indeed.

And that's the problem with this book. The vast majority of the book details the author's life as a Christian, but it is written almost with the mindset she had at the time. That is to say, her thoughts and experiences at the time are vividly described, but moments of introspection are rare - seldom is there a thought looking critically at her inner life with the benefit of subsequent experience. There is no attempt at analysis of the Christian experience from the perspective of an experienced unbeliever. In fact, the "deconversion" is somewhat lukewarm (and sudden, in terms of the amount of space devoted to it), and is motivated mostly by a desire for a more fulfilling relationship rather than a critical examination of the narrow cosmology she espoused as a born-again.

Therefore I felt that the book didn't live up to its promise. What I hoped for was a journey from naivete to fundamentalism and then onward to a more mature outlook, and to some degree this is what's delivered, but there's no space devoted to writing *about* the journey, just a description of how it felt at the time.

I'd love to hear, for example, the author's thoughts on the phenomenon of speaking in tongues (the "prayer language" she develops) now that she is no longer a believer. What does she think was going on? How does she explain her ecstatic mental state without the benefit of the holy ghost? What part of her was generating those words? Could she do it again? Alas, these questions are not asked in the book; we recieve instead a prosaic description of how it felt to pray for the ability to do it, and how it felt to be filled with the magical "language", and so on, but it is treated in the telling just as it was treated at the time - as a gift from God.

I'll keep a look out for more work by the author in case she decides to tackle these issues in a subsequent work.

I ordered this book expecting something along the lines of Karen Armstrong's The Spiral Staircase. Knowing that the author would ultimately reject her faith (no secret when you read "A memoir of salvation found and lost" on the cover), I assumed that she would ultimately be forced to acknowledge the gut-wrenching, terrifying, irreconcilable conflict between the faith of her youth and her reason. As someone who belonged to a group similar to the nondenominational and evangelical churches Carolyn describes when I was a teen and young adult, I guess I was just hoping to read the experiences of someone who had gone through what I had when I left. But she didn't.

I suspect that the first chapters were written as exercises in autobiographical short stories, probably shared with her classes (or perhaps the whole thing was just written to impress her tenure committee). There's Carolyn, our young Scout, with her tireless mother and her embarrassing home by the town dump. Then there's the chapter about her sister getting braces, and a reappearance of her mother, now leggy and captivating, like the narrator's mother in A Prayer for Owen Meany. Instead of presenting a rounded characterization of her mother, she simply presents her as one female archetype, then another. This seems to be how Briggs views herself as well. More on that later.

Briggs fills in details that couldn't (and shouldn't) be remembered, especially what was served for dinner the night a conversation or incident took place. Yes, fabricating details makes a story read better, but it makes us doubt the veracity of our author.

I'm certainly not the first reviewer to say it, but I'll join in the chorus that finds her deconversion completely perplexing and self-serving. I could see a person who loses her faith and then loses the only reason for staying in an unhappy marriage, similar to the couples who wait until the kids are out of the house and then separate. But as she tells it, she decided to leave her husband first, and therefore there must be no God. "I could not leave Eric. It would mean leaving God" (271). Well, it would have meant leaving her church, but many self-proclaimed believers leave their marriages, claim that God led them to do it, and then find a new church. The old church probably won't accept their choice, but a new church that doesn't know the original spouses will find it easy to accept them, especially if they imply the fault lay with the ex-spouse.

I feel sorry for the author and the people she portrays in the book. As an ex-Christian, I know how it can be irritating to have your Christian friends judge you, determining that your faith was weak or non-existent in the first place. Perhaps this was an exercise in proving to them how hard she tried, how sincerely she believed. Or perhaps it was to prove to her new world of academic bohemia just how kooky her patriarchal religion had been. Most likely, this was an exercise in reflection that would have been better spent in a therapist's office, not put in print for the world to read how she abandoned her family to "find" herself.

Most sad to me was her obvious heartache over her father's absence for a couple of years in high school and her subsequent oblivious rerun of this scenario with her own child. "Lauren didn't particularly like me. She was fourteen, and I had been in school since she was seven years old. She grew into a daddy's girl while I went to class and studied, stayed late for parties" (286), she says to explain how her absence wouldn't faze her child. I honestly don't believe she recognized that she was doing to her child what had destroyed her at the same age. She allowed her teenager's apparent disdain to justify her absence (my guess is her father had a similar excuse). Again, I'd recommend therapy over writing a memoir any day.

One recurring theme in the memoir is that of the female temptress, the Jezebel. As she tells it, Briggs' conservative community eyed women with suspicion, blaming them for distracting the men with their beauty. As she becomes more and more secular, instead of rejecting that she is little more than a hot body that men can't keep their eyes off of, she just decides to embrace this idea. In fact, the memoir is littered with interactions with men who want her. Perhaps a driving force in her life, no doubt connected to her father's absence, is that of wanting to be wanted by a man. And I believe that had she and her husband somehow kept this dynamic up, she would have remained with him and in her faith. My sad prediction is that her second marriage is no more secure than the first if she doesn't deal with these issues.

I was hoping to read the memoir of a strong woman who realized that she was still a good person, in fact, probably a better person, after she rejected her antiquated and stifling faith. I was hoping she would recognize her cognitive dissonance, and choose her intellectual integrity over her church and beliefs, despite the villification that would be sure to follow. Instead, I felt like I was reading about a teenager who, kept on a tight leash by her parents in high school, indulges in stupid excesses in college.

As a lifelong non-believer, who in his angry youth used to enviously attack faith wherever he found it, I was surprised to find myself saddened by this story of a woman who, as I once would have put it, "came to her senses". But it's difficult to watch her travel from the genuinely caring (if certainly narrow and occasionally hypocritical) community of "Jesus Freaks" to the group of adolescently self-absorbed, really flaming jerks she gives herself over to in graduate school and not feel that she's thrown out the baby with the bathwater.

I've always thought Anna Karenina was just a deluded hussy, so I'm trying to reserve judgment on Briggs's decision to walk away from her loving but predictable husband and their three children to enjoy a mid-life swoon over literary Ireland. (Although she claims otherwise, I'm sorry: by the time you reach 40, you ought to be mature enough to realize that relishing one's exquisite sensitivity to Yeats is no substitute for behaving decently towards one's fellow human beings.) But one thing I'm not afraid to say is that - even if you're prepared to take it for granted that the cold truth of existentialism is preferable to the comforting fantasy of a Being who counts the fall of every crow - this book is a very ineffective advertisement for the secular life.

The subtitle of this book is "a memoir of salvation found and lost." After reading the book, I am filled with anything but a sense of loss. I saw it rather as a double-conversion narrative. The narrator's first conversion is indeed a religious one, and she becomes a religious zealot, closing her eyes and taking Kierkegaards leap of faith. However, her story doesnt end there. Blind faith and the pressures of daily living are seldom content to coexist, and the narrator experiences a second, bittersweet awakening... an intellectual one. In many ways, this is a feminist memoir but, this is no Redstockings Manifesto. Instead, Briggs brings to mind the grace and courage of Zora Neale Hurstons Janie in Their Eyes Were Watching God. What Briggs most wants is to, like Janie, find her unique voice. With the publication of this memoir, it seems that she has at last found it.
Briggs daringly and honestly tackles the complex issue of faith and doubt. She appears to possess both in great quantities and remains undaunted by the contradiction. Briggs is searching for a god that allows her to serve her/him while exploring and embracing her own humanity... a god who liberates rather than represses In the end it is unclear whether or not she has found the faith that she is looking for, but I am left with the sense that she will tirelessly continue searching.
I read this memoir in one sitting.

If I had known how anticlimactically this book would end, I wouldn't have wasted any time on reading it. I was hoping to learn how the author discovered that her religion was based on a false foundation and what effects that discovery had on her. Instead it turns out that she ran out of passion for her hardworking and apparently very decent husband and decided to divorce him, after letting him put her through seven years of school. In order to reconcile this decision with her conscience, she had to dump "God" too. A more feeble reason for giving up a religion that has been the framework of one's life for twenty years can hardly be imagined.

My other sentiments concerning this book have already been ably expressed by other reviewers, and I should perhaps add that I am an atheist.

I found the book an interesting read because it relates well to the things I went through as a Jehovah's Witness. Like the author, higher education became my conduit during exile from "the Truth."

I think the book ended abruptly, and left some issues dangling. However, it's a memoir of where the author is at the time she wrote the story. I hope she writes another memoir in a few years so readers can follow her next spiritual and life stages.

John Shelby Spong has an insightful book that goes beyond the stage of exiting a spiritual path, to discovering God anew. It's a great follow up after reading, "This Dark World." Spong's new book is called, "A New Christianity for a New World."

This may sound a bit judgemental considering that she was pregnant and married in her teens and that she lacked a father figure when she needed him the most. But, I think the author should have waited another 10 years or so before writing her memoir. I think that seeing her romantic delusions that she completely buys into at the end of the book fall apart, as they inevitably would considering the basis that they were founded on, would have given her a much more mature and realistic appraisal of her life and would have inspired real introspection. Her journal of self-justification was not a story of empowerment or "finding herself" or even being a "strong woman", but one of acquiesence to the common delusion that enlightement is "out there somewhere" at the end of an exciting adventure rather than here, in the now through true introspection and re-evaluation of one's thought and motives. She had been given substantial opportunities to learn what love and strength really were and instead opted for the more pleasureable and selfish road out of her problems and malaise. She did not face herself or her Shadow in a meaningful way, only changed the method of escape from one form of entertainment (consuming religion) to another (bohemian academics). I think she had an extraordinary wealth of material in her life to draw upon for an important memoir, she just rushed a decade or two too early into writing it, and thus misses some realizations that are obvious to the outside reader, but which she seems strangely unaware. As a result, it is not a book that offers anything substantive except encouragement to make the same selfish mistakes she did. But, she deserves credit for trying. Its not like I have ever wrote a memoir. But, I don't plan to until I am at least 70 and am able to look at my life more objectively.

I found "This Dark World" to be insightful and inspiring. Ms. Briggs presents an interesting, inside-out view of fundamentalist religion. She does this from the perspective of a conversion to fundamentalism, and then a slow but powerful enlightenment as she discovers chinks and inconsistencies in the armor of zealous religious faith.

A fast and easy read, this book left several impressions on me. It presented a believable (true, actually) account of how Christian religious fervor can lead otherwise intelligent people to behave irrationally for months or years. Second, it provided an inspiring example of one woman's successful struggles to find herself, her own voice, and finally her independence despite seemingly insurmountable obstacles and obligations.

As I watch and listen to recent world news, particularly the events in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and other middle-eastern Islamic states, I find myself thinking back to Ms. Brigg's story. She embraced Christianity, while the people cited in the newspapers appear to embrace Islam. But the parallels are striking: young people, difficult lives, and over-arching reliance on strict dogma to guide and justify their actions. The empathy Ms. Briggs evokes for her former plight has helped me to understand, at least in a small way, the susceptibility of people to religious dogma.

I whole-heartedly recommend Ms. Briggs' book. I found it interesting, insightful, and, unexpectedly, a useful tool for understanding another side of the human experience.

Both my age and the events of recent history have forced me to take a closer look at my own spiritual beliefs. The book, THIS DARK WORLD, by Carolyn Briggs, provided a bridge to both of those concepts simultaneously, while revealing the author's very personal history also. This book is the only book that I have read that has made believable the concept of total immersion into a fundamentalist way of life. I could actually understand how someone of clearly huge intelligence and compassion could enmesh themselves into this way of life. The author's daily routine of prayer, industry, and study seemed as plausible as the fast paced and hectic pursuit of materialistic goals that most of my own generation have devoted themselves to throughout the years of our adulthood. Ms. Briggs provides a very close look at the thought processes of the fundamentalist in general, and yet the revelation of her own experiences is what touches us the most. It has surprisingly large doses of a rather dry humor, while retaining its problematic theme all the same. Her memoir served many purposes for me. I think it would for many of us. There will be those, I am sure, who would believe that Ms. Briggs forsake her spirituality, but I believe that instead she found it.